[hwatkins]

If you are cloud based this does not sound correct. If you have the cluster autoscaler setup, then the cluster should grow to allow for the deployment based on the constraints in your deployment.

If you are on prem then this is reasonable, since you have limited physical hardware so the cluster can not automatically grow.

[dharmab]

There are scaling limits in Kubernetes that are independent of the Node count, depending on which components you have added on top of the vanilla components. My team has repeatedly load tested our clusters to failure without needing to create hundreds of Nodes.